Will Joe Biden be the 2020 Democratic nominee?

“A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who oversaw ‘60 Minutes,’ debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for the Weekly Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service.

“Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: ‘You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at ‘60 Minutes’] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.’

“He will regret that snide disparagement of the bloggers. …

“If it turns out that the Killian memos are indeed forgeries, the Internet will have played an invaluable role in exposing the fraud. … Free Republic, a Web bulletin board, raised early warning signals about the memos within hours of last Wednesday’s ‘60 Minutes’ broadcast. …

“A defensive Dan Rather went on the air Friday to complain of what he called a ‘counterattack’ from ‘partisan political operatives.’ In reality, traditional journalism now has a new set of watchdogs in the ‘blogosphere.’ … Sure, blogs can be transmission belts for errors, vicious gossip and last-minute disinformation efforts. But they can also correct themselves almost instantaneously — in sharp contrast with CBS’s stonewalling.”

—John Fund, writing on “I’d Rather Be Blogging,” Monday in Opinion Journal at www.opinionjournal.com

True confessions

“I have spent over 30 years teaching college composition at a variety of schools, large and small. …

“More and more regularly, I read essays that summarize all the dangers of moral relativism and a doctrine of individual choice taken as an actual rule of life. The wreckage is incredible and unbearable. Young women … think nothing of describing sexual acts in clinical and, at times, pornographic terms.

“Women in their very early 20s discuss the complications of raising three children conceived with three different fathers, and how hard it is to find time for fun and for dates with still other men. …

“What flabbergasts me the most, however, is the sort of essay in which a young woman pledges her allegiance to the sexual revolution, no matter how self-destructive that loyalty may be, by explaining in itemized steps the ways in which every women is required to defile herself to take her rightful place in the modern world.”

—Louis R. Tarsitano, writing on “Decomposition 101,” in the September issue of Touchstone

‘The good fight’

“I take heart from people who fought the good fight regardless of what the odds looked like. I often think of Whittaker Chambers, who left the communist movement at a time when he thought he was leaving the winners to go join the losers. I think of people in World War II landing in these God-forsaken islands out in the Pacific. They must have wondered, ‘What does anyone want with this miserable piece of land?’ They went ahead and fought and many of them died for it. …

“I’m always embarrassed when people say that I’m courageous. Soldiers are courageous. Policemen are courageous. Firemen are courageous. I just have a thick hide and disregard what silly people say.”

—Thomas Sowell, interviewed in the September issue of the American Enterprise